Microsoft

According to a follow up article on VentureBeat, Microsoft fired Robert Delaware a game test contractor who talked to Dean Takahashi about the Xbox 360 "Red Ring of Death" issue. In a recent article, Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat wrote about the chronological series of events that led to the hardware failures faced by the Xbox 360. Often called the “Red Ring of Death”, it is a condition that describes when three flashing red lights light up the front of an Xbox 360 indicating hardware failure.

Microsoft and Novell Thursday released a virtualization bundle that represents the pair's first fully supported joint product since their historic interoperability partnership was forged in 2006.

The two have configured and optimized Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to run as a guest operating system on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. The product is the first to include technology developed by both vendors at the Microsoft and Novell Interoperability Lab they opened just over a year ago in Cambridge, US.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) browser includes a keystroke-logging search suggestion tool similar to the one that Google modified Monday after coming under fire from consumers.

Unlike Chrome, IE8 Beta 2 does not enable the feature -- which some have compared to a keylogger -- by default. One privacy expert said that was a "huge difference."

Microsoft Corp. today patched eight vulnerabilities, all rated critical, in four security updates for Windows, Office, Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer 6, SQL Server and other programs.

Microsoft released four patches on Tuesday, closing five critical flaws in its widely used graphics device interface (GDI+) library as well as three security holes in its other software products.

The security vulnerabilities in the GDI+ library affect a wide number of applications, because the library itself is a common component of Windows applications. All five vulnerabilities patched by Microsoft's GDI+ update are rated critical for at least one of the company's applications or operating systems, according to Microsoft's security bulletin.

Microsoft this week said development of its virtualization management tool would be complete in 30 days and reiterated that it would ship sometime during the last three months of this year as promised.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) is the company's first tool for managing its recently released Hyper-V platform, along with virtualization environments from VMware.

Senior Microsoft security strategist Steve Riley has used the vendor's TechEd conference in Sydney to rebut claims by a Polish researcher that Microsoft's hypervisor software could be maliciously replaced on PCs without administrators knowing.

The hypervisor is the portion of Microsoft's operating system that controls virtual operating system instances. Researcher Joanna Rutkowska has caused a debate over the several years by developing a hypervisor rootkit she claims could go undetected on a PC.

Microsoft will fix four critical flaws in next week’s so-called Patch Tuesday update, according to a security bulletin.

All involve remote code execution in Microsoft products. The first affects Windows Media Player 11 across various operating systems, while the second affects Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, .NET Framework, Office, SQL Server, Visual Studio.

The third update concerns a Windows Media Encoder problem in Windows and the fourth fixes flaws the Office suite. More details and patches will be available from the Microsoft site on Tuesday.

Microsoft announced last week that the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 would include the rumored "private browsing" mode, designed to conceal a user's activities from other users of the same PC. A privacy mode is already a feature of Apple's Safari browser, and a similar technology is available in Mozilla's Firefox, as well as the newly announced Google Chrome. Private browsing mode utilizes techniques that automatically delete search history, page cache, and browsing history so the next user can't see where you've been or what you've been up to.

Microsoft this week is continuing its ongoing investigation into what it calls "new public reports" of a vulnerability that could allow hackers to gain superuser privileges through LocalSystem in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.